A Time for Every Purpose
by masqueofanarchy
Summary: 3.11, Post curse-reversal, pre One-Year-Later - CS The Enchanted Forest is no Neverland - one difference in particular sends Killian's mind reeling and sets him to a new purpose.


He knew she'd make it over — in the haze of absolute heartache he felt hearing Regina describe the curse, it still registered that _everyone_ would return to where they belonged, and his ship was just as alive as any of them. When the purple smoke cleared and he was sure that the thrumming sound of Emma and Henry driving away was only a ghost in his ears, he raised his eyes to crumbling walls and tragic faces, and without a word turned away from everyone and marched towards the castle's port without suffering a glance behind him. He missed the brief look Snow and Charming shared before they continued on their trek to their ruins.

He told himself it was just to check how she handled the jolt of jumping through realms — his own legs still felt like they were only just carrying him forward — but as he stepped onto her decks, he knew it was a ridiculous thing to try to keep up the lie, even to himself. This was where _she_ was, not in the castle which had only seen her soul for the briefest of seconds — it was here. He stumbled like a man half-dead down the rungs leading to his quarters and it hit him full force.

The last time he had climbed down here it was with an arm full of blankets and cushions for the boy. The air high above Neverland was much sharper and colder than the sticky jungle they'd just escaped, and Henry had been through so much already. He froze at the bottom rung and was captured by the scene in front of him. Her hair, snarled by the whipping wind was falling in front of her eyes as she stooped over her sleeping son, running fingers along his brow. He'd never seen anything more beautiful. Her red-rimmed eyes snapped up to meet his and lingered for a moment, softening ever so slightly and he felt his heart leap with a brilliant spark of hope. He gestured forward with the covers in his arm and she released the smallest of smiles with a nod. He walked over to the table, careful to muffle his steps, left the blankets there and turned back towards the ladder. He was halfway up when he heard the whispered 'thank you', but when he turned back, her eyes were fixed on the chest rising and falling beneath her hand.

It hurt more than he could have imagined. Of all the ghosts that haunted these decks, hers was the only living one. There was no finality, no closure and she was out there, somewhere out there walking and breathing and so tangible his fingers ached. He curled up on the bed and slept.

Two days later Snow arrived. He was sitting at his table with an untouched piece of parchment rolled out in front of him staring into the blankness trying to remember why he took it out in the first place. Clad in hunting gear but looking every inch the queen, she lowered herself into his cabin and sat in the chair across from him. She was silent and he was grateful. She reached tentatively across the table and placed her hand over his, halting his fingers which were worrying aimlessly at the end of the sheet. He took a deep breath and looked up at her — her features so like Emma's it nearly killed him — and she gave him a sad, sweet smile and a gentle nod. He started gathering his things a few hours after she'd left.

The next few weeks he poured himself into the restoration telling himself that he was doing it all for her. Every brick he helped place, every gnarled and rooted spadeful he helped overturn he did with her face in front of him. She would be here to see it and she'd like it a certain way, he told himself, because his Swan had her likes and dislikes and the alternative made him want to crawl back onto his ship and join the rest of the shades waiting for him there. And if David made him laugh now and then, and he and Bae were starting to talk to each other as men instead of rivals, well that was something, too.

In the end it was the garden that broke him. Those first tentative shoots peering out from the sodden ground that greeted him one morning as he made ready for the day's work stopped him dead in his tracks. He stood there staring at the constellations of bright green dotting the earth in front of him as everyone started milling around, wiping breakfast off of their lips and clapping each other on the back at these first signs of new life — growth, progress — in the ravaged and neglected landscape, and didn't they only just put those seeds down a few…

He turned heel and ran like hell.

This time it was Charming who followed him. He heard the king stomping across the deck but that did nothing to stop his flurry of manic activity. He didn't bother to look up from the book he was poring over, comparing it to a few maps he had spread across the small table, ink pot and lantern on either end keeping the scroll from snapping shut.

"What do you think you're doing, Hook?"

Killian's eyes snapped up at David's tone, nearly growling in its tightness, and gestured flippantly at the desk.

"What does it look like? Having an afternoon reading break, mate." He raised his eyebrows in what he knew was a childish challenge.

"You can't just run off and, and disappear like that when we're getting threats like the one that came in last week. You're supposed to be with us. At the castle. No one knew where you were — Snow was worried — you —"

"I was on my ship. Where I should be. Doing what I should have been doing from the moment we landed back here. Sod the threats, sod your castle. I'm not waiting around anymore."

He found himself rising along with his voice as he spoke and he thumped his hand and hook on either side of the table in punctuation. He hunched and trained his eyes back down at his scattered papers, looking miles past the blurred letters as he waited, listening for Charming's next move. He watched the boots making a slow circle around the table, inspecting the books and his spiked scrawlings in the margins of the map and he waited for the pieces to fall together.

"Killian, you can't be —"

"What else would I be doing?"

"But you know it's closed off. We can't —" Killian wished David's anger had kept up because this soft, _desperate_ tone was setting his teeth on edge.

"I don't care. I can't pretend at this anymore, Dave. I'm —"

He paused, not sure if he could even express the fears tearing through every corner of his mind to anyone who would remotely understand except, and a bitter laugh pulled through his clenched teeth, the Croco — no, Rumpelstiltskin.

Time was passing. Time was passing. Time was passing and seconds were moving that he could never, ever reclaim and in the garden he'd finally understood what he realized while huddled away on his ship those first few days — that after 300 years, this wasn't Neverland, and he didn't have forever. His love wasn't a dead memory fading only in the details he could recall by rubbing his face into a linen shirt folded carefully away in the bottom drawer. One month had trickled by for her and for him in turn. She'd spent one month building memories that weren't with him, one month sleeping in a bed that wasn't his, one month speaking with people who didn't know who she was, what she meant, how deeply wonderful she was. There was nothing to keep him suspended and vital while he planned and plotted this time. This time he would fade away. Every second that passed, every day he spent thinking of her was one he could never, ever spend with her again — one day _lost_.

"— getting older."


End file.
